tirsdag 29. juli 2014

Today, July 29, is the feast of St Olav of Norway, possibly the most important of Norwegian saints. Olav Haraldsson was born in 995 and died at the battle of Stiklestad close to modern-day Trondheim in 1030. In the year after his death, he was declared a saint by Bishop Grimkell whom Olav had brought from England to Norway, and he quickly became a rallying point for Norwegians who were disappointed with the Danish overlordship. Many of those who sought the saint's protection were his former enemies, many of whom had been Christian for many years and no thanks to Olav. It is therefore a myth that Olav brought Christianity to Norway, but as a saint he became a figurehead that united Norwegian Christians.

Olav has engendered a significant cultural legacy, as can be seen in the wealth of texts and sculptures depicting him. In later blogpost I hope to return to this fascinating repertoire of medieval culture, but this time around it will have to suffice with a modern hymn for St Olav, written in in 1896 by the Norwegian poet and playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. I will first give the Norwegian text, which can be found here along with the musical setting by Wolfgang Plagge from 2000. I will then provide a literal translation of the text.

onsdag 23. juli 2014

One of the most persistent myths about
the Middle Ages, is the idea that medieval men and women thought the
earth was flat. This myth has become one of the rafters in the great
narrative of modernity, which is built around the idea of continuous
historical progress in which mankind's self-improvement is as linear
as the passing of time. The grand narrative of modernity is largely
based on an intense, unrelenting optimism and enthusiasm about
technological advancement and societal development, to a great extent
propped up by a secularist dislike of religion and the rise of
relativism. The main idea seems to be that since society is always
improving - which is one of the great dictums of modernity's
champions - things must have been pretty bad all those centuries ago,
especially since the world was dominated by a tyrannical, monolithic
church and science was kept at bay by the metaphysics of monks. That
this is grossly simplistic can be seen in this short article on the
myth of the flat earth.

The origin of this idea has been traced
to the novel The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
by Washington Irving, published in 1828, in which the belief in a
flat earth becomes the foil of the medieval powers and elevates the
hero Columbus who single-handedly proved the earth's spherical shape.
This misconception is prevalent even today, and has been taught in
schools for a long time.

Although
the myth has been ascribed to Washington Irving's novel, the idea
that the medieval world was flat may have been in circulation long
before 1828. In this blogpost, I will look at an excerpt from Adam of
Bremen's Gesta Hamaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum,
written in the 1070s, which may show us one of the sources for the
idea of a flat medieval earth.

The
excerpt in question describes a voyage into the deep northern waters
for the purpose of finding out whether there was any solid land
beyond Iceland (which is described as the world's outermost region,
even further away than Greenland and Vinland). Eventually, the
expedition reaches the northern waters and discover that the world is
covered by a thick fog, and after a while they reach the end of the
earth where there is a deep chasm in which water flows in and out.
This is the fount of tides, according to Adam of Bremen. Since it was
still unknown in the 11th century that the moon affected the tides
and ebbs of the earth, it was believed that the tide was caused by
the ocean issuing out of this great abyss. The excerpt is found in
book four, chapter 39. The following is my own translation, and it
can be checked against the Latin text. I have also
used, as a corrective reference, the translation into Norwegian by
Bjørg Tosterud Danielsen and Anne Katrine Frihagen from 1993.

Thereafter
passing on this side Denmark and on the other side Britain they
arrived at the Orkneys, which they kept on their left side when
passing, having Norway on the right side and assembled after a long
voyage at the frozen Iceland. From this point they plowed the waters
into the furthermost region of the seven stars [i.e. the Arctic], and
after a while they put behind them all the islands that could be seen
- of which I have spoken above - and commending their brave journey
unto the omnipotent God and the blessed confessor Willehad, they then
were plunged into this dark mist of the frozen waters, which the
eyes could penetrate only with great difficulty. And lo: the unstable
channel of the ocean returning to the hidden beginning of its source,
and the unfortunate, despairing sailors - indeed, imagining death
only - were drawn with a most forceful urge towards chaos [it is said
to be the chasm of the bowels of the earth] [sic.], [towards] this
deep in which, rumour has it when the sea seems to withdraw, all the
seas return and are then swallowed up and again spewed back up from
whence they are said to have sprung. When these sailors now solely
implored the merciful God to receive their spirits, the force of this
returning sea washed some of the ships away, while others were
repelled by the flowing water and brought back a long way behind the
rest. And after they had been liberated from this present danger,
which their eyes clearly saw, by help of the favourable God, with
great strength they took to the oars to help the escape.

What
is interesting to my purpose here is the idea of a great chasm at the
end of the world. This image, sailors falling off an edge and into
the deep unknown, is emblematic of how the idea of the medieval flat
earth has been represented. However, Adam of Bremen is not talking
about a flat earth, he is talking about a chasm in the Arctic from
which water issues and is drawn back, thus creating those mysterious
tides. The chasm in itself, as any discerning reader will note, does
not and can not suggest a flat earth, for if it did the water that
went into the chasm could not be regurgitated from it. Elsewhere in
his work, it is also very clear that Adam operates with a spherical
world, as he refers to the British sea which runs into the Arctic and
covers the whole world - not in the sense that it flows to the edges
of the world and then falls into the void, but in the sense that it
runs around the globe.

When
considering this excerpt from Adam's Gesta hamaburgensis,
it is easy to see a possible origin for the idea that medieval men
and women thought the world was flat. If the anecdote about the
Frisian sailors who toppled into the chasm at the end of the world
entered folklore and became one of those stories of imprecise and
unknown origin, you don't need many steps before the regurgitating
chasm is replaced by a cosmic void. Of course, we don't know that
this confusion has taken place, and I'm certainly not saying that
Adam is the source for Washington Irving's misconception, but the
anecdote nonetheless illustrates those potential misunderstandings
which become so ingrained in public consciousness as to morph into
factoids.

mandag 21. juli 2014

To a medievalist, summer season is conference season, and in the course of June and July several conferences have been arranged and are being arranged for the purpose of bringing together people who study the Middle Ages in some capacity. I myself gave a paper at the annual International Medievalist Congress in Leeds, and in time I might dedicate a somewhat lengthy blogpost on this wonderful experience. I'm still composing myself in the aftermath of the congress and finally moving out of my apartment, so I'm still not in a frame of mind suitable for writing lengthy blogposts. In the interrim, here is a poem by Seamus Heaney, which is a friendly nod to my fellow medievalists who last week participated at the New Chaucer Society at Reykjavik.

Medieval man
understood time differently from how we do. We tend to think of time
as linear and divided into successive epochs. We recognise to a great
extent that these epochs are constructs which help us navigate and
make sense of history, but they are nonetheless an inextricable part
of the way we understand the past. For learned people of the Middle
Ages, men and women, things were different. They likewise had
successive epochs, like the six ages of man as formulated by Saint
Augustine or the four kingdoms expressed in the Book of Daniel, but
history had a teleological nature which to many historians these days
is alien.

This difference makes it sometimes very difficult for
modern historians to faithfully represent medieval people in their
research. Often, historians run the risk of focussing on one
particular aspect of, say, a medieval monk's literary output, while
ignoring some other parts that may be just as significant. The
Norwegian medievalist Dr. Sigbjørn Sønnesyn has recently argued
that the historiographical output of William of Malmesbury must be
considered in conjunction with his theological work, and his office
as historian should not be separated from his office as cantor and
participant in the monastic liturgy at Malmesbury Abbey. By pointing
to these two aspects of William of Malmesbury's life as a monk, Dr.
Sønnesyn points to one of the significant problems often encountered
in medieval studies: the frequent neglect of the omnipresent
liturgical rites so fundamental to the monastic life.

To be
precise: there are many medievalist scholars, and not all of them
musicologists, who have done significant research which includes
liturgical sources. However, the tendency, addressed by Dr. Sønnesyn,
to divorce William of Malmesbury the historian from William of
Malmesbury the liturgist, has resulted in a failure to consider his
historiographical output together with his theological work.

In this
blogpost, I want to follow up on Dr. Sønnesyn's remarks on the
relationship between liturgy and history, and argue that this
relationship is only natural to a medieval mind because of the
multi-layered nature of medieval time, or perhaps rather times. These
musings are also informed by a one-day colloquium held at St Mary's
College in London and papers given by Emma Dillon, Nils Holger
Petersen and Beth Williamson.

First of all, in
medieval historical thought there were two major strands of the
movement or progression of history. Both of these were formulated
around the eve of the Western Roman Empire, both of these were
founded upon Jewish history as presented in the Bible and both of
them were expressively Christian. The oldest strand was that
formulated by Augustine, and which in German scholarship is referred
to as Heilsgeschichte, the history of the salvation of mankind (with thanks to Nathaniel Campbell). In this
presentation of history, Augustine sought to express the progression
of time from Creation unto Judgement Day and was concerned with the
work of holy men and women and God's intervention in mankind's life
and work.

St Augustine in his study

Sandro Botticelli

Courtesy of Wikimedia

The second strand to
be considered here was formulated by Augustine's disciple Orosius and
was concerned with the passing of earthly empires, for the most part
modelled on the historical books of the Old Testament, in particular
Kings and Chronicles, but perhaps also heavily informed by that
famous dictum of Ecclesiastes: There is no new thing under the sun.
This approach by Orosius, called Weltreichslehre
by German scholarship, was often placed within the overarching
narrative of Heilsgeschicte.

Both
these strands of history are linear in the sense that they have a
clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined end. At the same
time, both these strands have cyclical aspects to the way history
progresses. In Augustine's Heilsgeschichte,
we encounter men and women who imitate Christ in their lives and
works and sometimes deaths, and although each life and death has a
beginning and an end, this succession of imitations has a certain
cyclical aspect to it. In a similar way, Weltreichslehre
describes the cyclical rise and fall and ultimate demise of kingdoms,
empires and princedoms in their progression through history towards
Judgement Day. In this sense we see that to a medieval
historiographer, history had at least two layers of time, two
parallel lines of historical progression.

A
similar multiplicity of layers can be found within the yearly cycle
of monastic life. I do not claim that these layers correspond with
those of historiography, for that would imply that historiography and
liturgy are separate spheres of historical progress. Rather, these
layers come in addition to those presented in historiographical
writing and help to illustrate how thoroughly medieval life was
permeated by multiple layers of historical progress.

In
the liturgical year we also find an overarching narrative of linear
progression, as the liturgy recreates the temporale,
the life and times of Christ, beginning at Advent, reaching a climax
at Easter and then coming to its close around All Saints. Of course,
this linear narrative in turn becomes cyclical since it is reenacted
every year, but within the structure of the liturgical year it is
linear in a way similar - but not identical to - Augustine's vision
of the history of the holy.

However,
within this overarching structure of the temporale,
the liturgical year is also marked by the daily cycle of the divine
office, in which saints are celebrated in a series of communal
prayers and meditations known as the hours. The office begins at
Vespers, around six in the afternoon, on the day before the saint's
day and concludes with the Vespers of the saint's day, an hour known
as the second Vespers. Similar to Orosius' everchanging yet
neverchanging succession of earthly realms, the catalogue of saints
celebrated in the divine office, the sanctorale,
was continuously emended with new saints being added and old saints
receiving new days as their relics were moved. Additions occurred,
but these additions were celebrated in the same way as the older
saints. There were differences in celebration, of course, depending
on the time of the year and the importance of the saint at a
particular monastery. For instance, St Edmund had a more significant
position at Bury St Edmunds than he had at, say, Westminster Abbey.
Despite these differences, the daily celebration of the divine office
nonetheless was a liturgical wheel within the greater liturgical
wheel of the temporale.

Day of Judgement

Triptych by Hans Memling, fifteenth century

Courtesy of Wikimedia

The
liturgical year as a recreation of the life and times of Christ
points to one interesting difference between medieval historiography
and literature pertaining to the cult of the saints, i.e. hagiography
and liturgy. While historiography - through the Orosian approach -
was largely modelled on the Old Testament, hagiography and liturgy
were chiefly concernced with the imitatio Christi
of the saints. This does not mean that historiography did not employ
motifs from the New Testament or that liturgy did not refer to events
of the Old Testament, but we see that historiography and liturgy
focus on different parts of the Bible. In this way we can sense that
historiographical writing and liturgical celebration form a kind of
unity in the way that they each emphasise different parts of the
Bible and together create a whole within which medieval men and women
navigate their way towards Heaven.

When
we consider the multiple layers of time that permeated the life of a
medieval monk or a nun, there is little reason to separate the monk
as a writer of history from the monk as a partaker in the daily
rhythm of the liturgical year. Consequently, when we consider a
medieval monk's historical oeuvre, like that of William of
Malmesbury, we would do well to remember that his writing must have
been heavily informed by liturgical ritual and the theology espoused
at the monastery at which he worked. Taking this into consideration,
we must also, as Dr. Sønnesyn wisely exhorts us to do, look at
points where the liturgical background bleeds into the arrangement of
historiography. What implications this has on the presentation of
morality of history or the interpretation of worldly events are
aspects that must be examined on an individual basis, but must be
included in order to represent a medieval monk's literary production
as faithfully as possible.

Om meg

Norwegian medievalist, bibliophile, lover of art, music and food. This blog is a mixture of things personal and scholarly and it serves as a venue for me to share things I find interesting with likeminded people.